Patriot game Red Hot Patriot is the work of twin-sister journalists Margaret and Allison Engel, the former the head of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which awards journalism fellowships, the latter communications director for the University of Southern California.

Love sick I think of Measure for Measure , with its fanatically chaste heroine, and All's Well That Ends Well , with its lovely lass in pursuit of a lout, as Shakespeare's "Smart Women, Foolish Choices" plays.

Propeller flies Hie thee to the Boston University Theatre, where the BU School of Theatre and the Huntington Theatre Company are presenting England's Propeller theater company in Richard III and The Comedy of Errors in rep (through June 19).

Egyptian dish In Antony and Cleopatra, the Brangelina of the ancient world are transported from messy, histrionic life to the realm of legend. Audiences at Actors' Shakespeare Project's streamlined, slightly rearranged presentation of the play are less likely to be transported.

Top secrets Turing is no grandstanding stammerer. The occasional, pained hesitation is a small if integral part of a portrayal that captures the decorated Turing's almost giddy passion for mathematics and his prophetic belief in the development of computers.

Mighty merchant The Rialto intersects Wall Street in Theatre for a New Audience's steely, droll, and deeply disquieting The Merchant of Venice (presented by ArtsEmerson at the Cutler Majestic Theatre through April 10).

Child's play "Little pitchers have big ears," the saying goes. In My Wonderful Day, which is getting its Boston premiere from Zeitgeist Stage Company (at the BCA Plaza Black Box through March 26), the little pitcher also has a notebook in which she is inscribing the title essay. And what a day for it!

Betrayal Dionysius does not appear in Prometheus Bound, but that doesn't stop the American Repertory Theater from turning the 2500-year-old shout-out against tyranny attributed to Aeschylus into a bacchanal (at Oberon through April 2).

Islands in the storm "Only connect," advises E.M. Forster, failing to add, "And be weird." John Kuntz, however, hears that double directive, perhaps blowing in the wind, and responds with The Hotel Nepenthe .

Cripple kicking Although Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan is the least likely of his plays to provoke a riot, as John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World did at its 1907 Dublin premiere, it is the most Synge-like of the Anglo-Irish dramatist’s works.